I am standing at water's edge on a broiling afternoon in late summer, lost in conversation with my friend David. We are exploring the whys and wherefores, as is our habit: how come we are the way we are, our problems with maintaining intimate relationships, which sleeping pills are effective and which zonk you out for the next day, how hard it is to get our work done. We've had conversations like this many times before and will no doubt have them many times again; it is the song we trill together, mining the inner landscape of the psyche the way other people might discuss their tennis game or the latest sex scandal.

David has never learned to swim, which I find oddly endearing. He also smacks noisily when he eats, which I find less so. We've known each other for what seems like forever and often bicker like an unhappily married couple. We could, in point of fact, never be married because David is gay, although I sometimes find myself wondering how things might have developed between us if he weren't. What's certain is that we would have had good-looking children.

David is one of a handful of gay men I have been close to over the years, men who provide a different kind of lens on the world from my female friends or straight men. It's impossible, however, for me to think of my dealings with gay men without the term fag hag immediately attaching itself to these relationships, making a cruel comedy out of what is a complicated and intriguing phenomenon. In the popular media, gay men generally feature as bitchy, high-strung confidants to brassy straight women—hairdressers of a sort, the men to whom you tell your more embarrassing secrets and confide trivial concerns. So it goes in TV shows like Will & Grace and Sex and the City, and countless movies, such as The Next Best Thing, the dismal Madonna–Rupert Everett vehicle. The idea that a straight woman's friendship with a gay man may serve a function beyond light relief—that it could touch on deeper needs not met by others—is rarely addressed. One recent exception was the Sundance Channel's Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, a short-lived docu-series (inspired by a collection of essays with the same name) in which straight women and their queer male companions laughed together—and, at times, cried together—all the while displaying the fortitude and strength of their platonic bonds. Albeit melodramatic at times, the show proved more layered in its depictions than the usual fare.

I've known David for nearly two decades. We are both writers and were drawn together by shared interests as well as a shared mood disorder marked by free-floating anxiety and a tendency toward depression. Like some, but not all, of the other gay men I've known, David is not immediately identifiable as homosexual. This has made it more difficult, if anything, to accept the fact that he is sexually indifferent to women; there's nothing, on the face of it, that should make it so. Although the common wisdom on the origins of gayness has gone in less than a century from viewing it as a pathology in need of correction to a completely genetic trait, like a gift for numbers, I find myself wondering whether our relegating it all to one side of the nature/nurture equation is not a matter of studious political correctness rather than scientific truth. Isn't it more likely that homosexuality is a combination of genetics and environment, like so many things?

I first fell in love with gay men through reading novels and essays by writers like Henry James and E. M. Forster, who happened to be gay but seemed to have an astonishing amount of insight into women. Given a choice between macho Ernest Hemingway and spinsterish Forster, for instance, I would have picked Forster every time, both as a man and a writer. Then, after I discovered the Bloomsbury set and immersed myself in their lives and writings, I became enamored of their freewheeling and somewhat confusing domestic arrangements, in which gay men lived with straight women (Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, and the artist Duncan Grant) and even occasionally believed they were sufficiently in love with one of the women to propose marriage (the writer Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf). Strachey, of course, was "out" in a time when being closeted was the norm; he was openly attracted to men yet had close friendships with a number of women. He eventually set up a household with the painter Dora Carrington, with whom he lived until his death. Carrington, who married another man to keep Strachey happy, was so distraught after Strachey's death that she essentially killed herself. I remember being shocked when I read of her suicide—they weren't lovers, after all—but also feeling a bond with their singular pairing and the unique passion it might have inspired.

Which brings me back to my dislike of the term fag hag (or "haggus fagulous," as Simon Doonan once coined it) and everything it implies, including an ostensible fear, on the hag's part, of straight men. In a virulently homophobic article I read, "The Fag Hag: How a Girl's Misguided Friendship Choices Can Lead to a Lifetime of Loneliness," the author conjectures that acne (!) is one reason an adolescent girl will seek out gay male friends and asserts the following: "Homosexuals of all ages and young women share many similar obsessions—clothes, gossip, melodramatic TV shows—and this is what draws them together." Although all stereotypes have bits of truth to them, I, for one, have never watched Glee or dyed my hair an outrageous color.

"You're so not a fag hag," my daughter says to me when I tell her what I'm writing about. I guess I know what she means, if by "fag hag" one is thinking of Liza Minelli, but even though I detest the moniker, I find myself brooding at being excluded from the category. The closest I have come to having what could be called a classically fag-hag type of relationship was with a man named John, whom I met in my late twenties. The first time I saw him, he was wearing a wig and very black mascara, the better to highlight his siren-blue eyes. I'd become acquainted with him through his partner, who sang in the chorus of the Met, and discovered that John had a wicked sense of whimsy—early in our friendship, he painted a sky with clouds on the roof of my balcony—and I also loved (there go all my protests to the contrary) his interest in the finer points of skin care and makeup. It was John who introduced me to the pore-tightening capacities of a certain white lotion by Janet Sartin and the necessity of using a lash-curler. There was something infinitely pleasurable about sharing my interest in such beautifying concerns with a man. Men usually seemed immune to these sorts of anxieties, after all; they were supposed to be the object at whom obsessive female primping was directed rather than the partner in these very rituals. It felt cozy to be part of a coed team when agitating about what pair of shoes looked better on me as I sat trying them on in a department store—less sequestered on the girls' side of the playground. After his partner died, John moved to Florida and we fell out of touch, but to this day I can't buy a new lipstick without wondering what he'd think of the color.

An article I read recently in a teen magazine took up the subject of the " `GBF' [Gay Best Friend] Phenomenon," noting that "Being part of a GBF couple has become the new platonic ideal"—as crucial an accessory to Gossip Girl tweens as a Mulberry bag on one arm and a preppy jock on the other used to be. But much as it may fill the pages of magazines and Style sections to ruminate on gay guys as trendy appendages, it seems to me that the more serious story underlying these relationships is that they allow for an escape from the constriction of gender binariness—from defining oneself along a limited spectrum of acceptably male and female roles. These friendships speak, that is, to the sexually androgynous aspect that is a part of our personalities, distinct from our socialized "feminine" selves. What I have in mind has less to do with a specific trait and more with a kind of brainpower—a penetrating analytical bent, say, or a corrosive wit—that makes straight men feel uneasy or downright threatened. My gay friends, by contrast, seem to enjoy precisely the "strong" or "ornery" sides of me.

Another way of putting it might be to say that they draw on the inner nonconformist that resides next to our groupthink identities—the ways in which we depart from the norms of our gender and class. To the extent that you don't have to be gay to feel like an outsider—you can feel like an outsider and be a functioning heterosexual—there is a feeling of relief that comes with having a common take on things, which is usually that of the ironic observer. I have aired some of my best renegade thoughts—I can't stand Jon Stewart, I miss typewriters—on my gay friends, safe in the knowledge that they won't immediately regard me as an alien.

Such relationships also encourage an experience of intimacy with a male that doesn't balance precariously on an erotic fulcrum, the all-or-nothingness of sex. Although there is always the possibility of a sexual charge hovering in the air even between gay men and straight females, the charge is usually faint by virtue of being ignored or sidestepped. Its absence provides a freedom of sorts; in its stead can be found a more relaxed atmosphere of mutual recognition that manages to draw on the native differences that exist between men and women without being filtered down into the ultimate test of sexual desire. Although friendships with gay men have some of the easy camaraderie of those with women, they're often blissfully free of the competitive edge that marks the latter, the constant impulse to contrast and compare.

In the past year and a half, I've become close with a gay man whom I knew in passing while we were both growing up. He got in touch with me after a decades-long relationship with a partner painfully ended, suggesting that we might get to know each other better. We've since spent a lot of time together, going to movies and plays, eating out, having intense conversations about everything under the sun. Through M., I've come to understand better the complexities that define homosexuality, the many varieties of gayness that coexist. Not long ago I went to a dinner party at his apartment, the first gathering he's hosted since his breakup. The table was set beautifully, the food impeccable, and the talk lively. The company was a mix of straights and gays, and at some point someone asked me what I was working on. I mentioned this piece, which immediately propelled the conversation into an impassioned discussion of whether there existed such a thing as a "gay" sensibility, whether it was all culturally dictated or whether there was an inherent proclivity toward certain traits. At the end of the dinner, an elegantly dressed, good-looking man wearing several bracelets, with whom I had chatted over hors d'oeuvres, walked me partway home. When it came time to say good night, he kissed me on both cheeks and proposed that we meet soon for dinner. "We're going to become the greatest of friends—I'm sure of it," he said in his animated way. To which I can only say: Bring it on. The world would be a paler, emptier place without my gay friends; that's all I know, fag hag or not.